smile! you’re on camera: stories of placemaking, surveillance, and carcerality from the Bronx bodega

This project explores processes of placemaking, surveillance, and political participation through stories from Bronx bodegas and through the frameworks of carceral geography, extrastatecraft, and actor-network theory. It attempts to understand the expansion of surveillance regimes into bodega spaces, not by observing moving objects, but by looking at the relationships of information flows, decision-making processes, and actor participation. By embedding the analysis in the narratives of local bodegueros, community members, and public representatives, this project contributes to critical technology and surveillance studies by complicating the literature with the lived experiences, epistemologies, and infrastructures of feeling in and around bodegas in the Bronx. In finding that surveillance as extrastatecraft is expanding into the immigrant spaces of bodegas without meaningful community engagement, this project concludes with a call to plan for abolition with intentional realignment of community organizations, bodega associations, and city institutions that center forms of collective care and protection as articulated by the communities they intend to serve

Optimizing Interdomain Routing for Today's and Tomorrow's Services

Large cloud and content (service) providers serve applications that are responsible for the vast majority of Internet traffic today. However, service providers have to contend with decades-old Internet protocols to do so and, in particular, to route latency sensitive user traffic over the public Internet to service provider networks. This reliance creates urgent problems as businesses/people/governments increasingly rely on the Internet for critical activities, and as new applications such as VR introduce increasingly strict network performance requirements. This dissertation explores the extent to which current ways service providers use the Internet's old protocols are sufficient to meet demands of today's and tomorrows applications. It then proposes using these old Internet protocols in new ways to reliably route user traffic over an unreliable public Internet by solving challenging optimization problems using new Internet measurement and modeling techniques. The systems described in this dissertation can help service providers work with existing infrastructure to deliver the reliable, performant service our increasingly connected society needs

The Tripod of Ming Foreign Policy: Land Borders, State Language Training, and Maritime Borders in the Long Shadow of the Mongol Empire

The dissertation considers three primary sets of evidence for the idea that Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE) foreign policy was an exercise in balancing two contradictory drives: the drive to become the premier successor state to the Mongol Empire of 1206-1368; and the drive to undo cultural perversions that had entered and altered the Sinosphere while the Mongols ruled it. These sets of evidence, realms of policy, are for convenience called tripods: the leg holding up the state that was its linked courier-relay network and land border policy; the leg that was its corps of language experts for communicating with other states; and the leg that was its maritime border policy, similar to its land borders but inverted in some odd respects. The dissertation finds based on Persian, Latin, and classical Korean accounts of theinterior of Ming territory that it looked very different from within than from without. Some travelers came and went still believing in the externally presented image, while others saw through it, if reluctantly, once they were within Ming territory. The difference between these outcomes was not contingent so much on the attitudes and presuppositions of the travelers themselves, but on the time period in which they traveled and the quite varying degree to which Ming officials carried out their supremacist directives from decade to decade. When they didn’t do their jobs, it showed, and foreigners walked away with a countervailing impression of the Ming as something other than the land to which all the world’s riches flowed, the hub around which all of Asia turned

Memory Traces: Indigenous Thought in Early American Natural Histories

This dissertation closely reads 18th and 19th century natural histories to demonstrate how explicit and implicit encounters between Western and Indigenous thought shaped Early American representations of ecological relation. Previous scholarship has both celebrated natural histories for advancing Enlightenment thought and criticized them for their role in the colonization of the Americas. My project argues that these approaches to the genre still overlook the substantive influence of Indigenous thought on how Western naturalists represented plants, animals, and other humans. Drawing upon post-structuralist theory, an interdisciplinary array of scholarship in the environmental humanities and Native and Indigenous studies, as well as nonacademic works by Indigenous writers, speakers, and storytellers, I argue that “memory traces” — typically imperceptible remnants — of Indigenous thought become legible if we superpose Western and Indigenous epistemologies when reading natural histories

The Puzzle of Leadership in Democratic Theory

This dissertation challenges the long-standing tendency in democratic theory to neglect, downplay, and, at times, altogether reject leadership as a normative component of democracy. While the topic of leadership is commonplace in empirical analyses of democratic politics, normative democratic theory remains largely silent on the role of leaders. Against this constraining legacy, I argue that leadership should be recognized as a constitutive—in fact, indispensable—element of a democratic regime. Through a critical examination of the three most influential traditions within postwar democratic theory—realist, participatory, and deliberative—I show that none has succeeded in offering a principled defense of leadership. Realist theorists such as Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl incorporated leaders into their frameworks, but only as a pragmatic concession to the problems of scale and complexity. Writing against what they saw as an elitist turn in democratic theory, the participatory theorists of the 1960s constructed an alternative model centered on the direct participation of ordinary citizens. Yet in disavowing leadership, participators ended up enabling even worse forms of it: informal, opaque, and unaccountable. Deliberative democrats, lastly, neither endorsed nor repudiated leadership; instead, they have largely ignored it. Although mass deliberation presupposes actors who initiate, facilitate, and give shape to collective reasoning, the deliberative tradition offers little guidance on who those actors are or how they ought to be constrained. Under this framework, too, leadership was bracketed, sidelined, or rendered invisible. To find an alternative and more productive way of thinking about the role of leaders in democratic settings, I turn to classical Athens. Unlike most contemporary theorists, the ancient Athenians did not regard leadership as antithetical to democracy, neither in theory nor in practice. Theoretically, democracy was defined not by the absence of all power inequalities, but by two crucial yet circumscribed principles of equality: isonomia (equal political rights) and isegoria (equal right to address the political assemblies). While these principles guaranteed citizens equal standing within the formal structures of political decision-making, they did not require the erasure of all political differentiation. On the contrary, Athenian democracy depended on a spirit of competition that presupposed the possibility of distinguishing oneself. In practice, the Athenians recognized that leaders were not only necessary but also beneficial to the functioning of the regime: they contributed technical competence, procedural efficiency, ideological coherence, and political pluralism. Although the Athenian case cannot fully resolve the dilemmas facing modern representative democracies, it offers a more promising foundation for developing a normative theory of democratic leadership—one that views leadership not merely as a force to be constrained, but as one of democracy’s key assets

Managing Marginality: Jails, Health, and Inequality

Jails play a unique role in the criminal legal system, incarcerating people who are awaiting trial or serving short sentences of less than a year. At midyear 2023, jails incarcerated 664,200 people and admitted 7.6 million people in the preceding 12 months (Zeng 2024). People incarcerated in jail often face several co-occurring hardships, including housing instability, untreated mental illness, and substance use problems, which jails can exacerbate. This dissertation argues jails create and respond to many of these problems associated with poverty, especially problems related to the health of incarcerated people. Across three papers, I demonstrate jails (1) were used as a punitive response to the prescription opioid crisis, especially in rural communities; (2) became a highly infectious environment in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic after failing to enforce many basic preventative measures like masking and social distancing, threatening the health of incarcerated people; and (3) readmit people with mental illness and substance use problems at much higher rates than people in good health. Taken together, these papers demonstrate the complex relationship between jails on the one hand and the health of incarcerated people and the public on the other

Other Selves: Critical Self-Portraiture in Cuba during the “Special Period in the Time of Peace,” 1991-1999

The path of Cuba’s cultural economy and patrimony deviated substantially during the “Special Period in the Time of Peace” (1991-1999), including the collapse of state sponsorship for the arts and the opening of the Cuban economy to foreign investment. This opening was slight but significant. Artists found themselves in a position where their work no longer solely existed as patrimony of the state but as personal methods of success and survival. My dissertation analyzes how three Black Cuban artists, René Peña, Belkis Ayón, and Elio Rodríguez, engineer and manipulate self-portraiture as a critical tool through which they can explore issues of belonging and place in connection to the Cuban national project. I attest that each artist positions representations of themselves, or their avatars, within their work to examine what it means to be Cuban, Black, and human. I begin my project by establishing how the figure of the White, hyper-masculine man has served as the ideal Cuban citizen following the revolution and independence. Cuban artists have explored themes of national identity and belonging since the mid-nineteenth century, in many instances reflecting on race and the presence of African descendants in Cuban society. The continued discourse on “racelessness” and the supposed eradication of racism in the country made the potential to be both Black and Cuban impossible. Official discourses on race after the 1959 revolution attempted to erase, and in many senses, whitewash, the historical legacy of racism in Cuba through the expressly public abolishment of discrimination and difference in Cuban society. An attempt to erase all forms of difference, or the visibility of difference, within Cuban society accompanied advances in equal opportunity to jobs, education, and housing for the Black Cuban community after the revolution. My project focuses on how Peña, Ayón, and Rodriguez contest the long-established hierarchy of race and gender in official cubanía [Cubanness] through visual discourses. I argue that the works of Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez are not examples of a hybrid, creolized synthesis but instead working products of investigation and play. Considering identity as a process and project always in flux, I contend that these three artists use aesthetic strategies to represent Cubanness and Blackness as not mutually exclusive but simultaneously iterative and dynamic. Considering their artistic practices as performances of Blackness and self, I present these artists as critical interlocutors of the cultural moment. I argue that Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón mobilize the Afro-diasporic conception of the self as external and multiple through their avatars as a form of self-fashioning. An avatar functions as a proxy for a person, acting as an extension of their self, traversing locations and discourses otherwise inaccessible to the primary self. Avatars blur the boundaries between the material and the virtual world and muddle the distinctions between subject and object, flesh and body. Peña, Rodríguez, and Ayón create portraits of their “other selves” to assert their subjectivity and personhood in realms that otherwise negate their presence. Through a close visual analysis of the work created by Peña, Ayón, and Rodríguez, I show how their use of alter-egos elucidates their experiences of the materiality of Blackness and the multiplicity of being. I argue that this is mainly present in the material processes inherent in the print-making and performative productions included in each. For example, in terms of color, Peña and Ayón use black and white critically, manipulating the various gray scales between the two tones to illustrate the many potentialities of cubanía. Rodríguez has interestingly moved into soft sculptural forms of blacks and whites, but the works discussed here use fixed colors to create a humorous play with traditional Cuban aesthetics. Each artist uses color differently, but through their processes, they imbue their works with a sense of materiality and personhood that is only possible through print. For these artists, the work’s creation becomes a performance of self-definition that parallels the many ways we perform race, nationhood, and belonging

Data: Can Arctic Sea Ice Melting Lead to More Summertime Heat Extremes?

The dataset includes the key variables that were used to generate the figures in "Can Arctic Sea Ice Melting Lead to More Summertime Heat Extremes?" submitted. We quantify the impact of late 21st century Arctic sea ice loss on Northern Hemisphere (NH) summertime heat extremes using model simulations that are forced by the future Arctic sea ice loss. First, we find an overall increase of heat extreme frequency in the NH continents in our model simulations, but only in the presence of ocean-atmosphere coupling. The increased frequency of heat extremes is mostly due to mean temperature increase. However, in comparison to future warming scenario, in general, increases in heat extremes in NH continents due to the future Arctic sea ice loss are relatively small. The results suggest a non-negligible but limited role of the future Arctic sea ice loss on contributing to the NH summertime heat extremes. More on variables: The dataset includes variables such as the Arctic sea ice fraction, boreal summer (June-July-August) mean near-surface temperature, and ratio of heat extreme frequency that are calculated from the CESM1-WACCM4 constrained sea ice model simulations

Transnational Afterlives of the Haitian Revolution: Between History and Fiction

My dissertation engages with the fields of Caribbean History and Literature, Theater and Performance Studies, Women and Gender Studies and Critical Translation Theory. It examines the global afterlives of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) in the 20th and 21st centuries. It contributes to Haitian Revolutionary Studies through an interdisciplinary lens that traces reciprocal influences that connect historical and imaginative approaches to the past. I also highlight the transnational circulation of Haiti as a symbol of resistance and independence across different time periods and geographies. Renowned authors such as Edouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, Langston Hughes and Maryse Condé all turned to the events of the Haitian Revolution in their works, and in scholarship grounded in diverse views of historical forces and the role of the historian. The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot famously wrote about the “silencing” of the history of the Haitian Revolution, not just through omission but also through banalization (i.e., misleading and trivializing representations that amount to a form of silencing) but since the 1990s, a lot more attention has been given to this history. My dissertation analyzes these recent directions and considers whether and in what sense we can observe Silencing. The Haitian Revolution is the site of numerous historiographical questions that I address through my study of works of history and literature: What is the relationship between the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolution? What makes the Haitian Revolution a world-historical event? Does the Haitian Revolution need a hero? How has Toussaint Louverture been singled out as a charismatic leader? How can we reflect and respond to the limits of archival traces of the lives of subaltern subjects, including enslaved women and free women of color? I show that the Haitian Revolution is a world-historical event that lies at the crossroads of history and literature, by engaging with authors like CLR James or Aimé Césaire who oscillate between historical and fictional accounts of this revolution and by considering its afterlives in world literature from the wider Caribbean, Africa, the Americas and Europe. In my dissertation, I think of literature as a different (complementary but also contestatory) site of engagement with archival traces. I consider, notably, how writers in several historical moments, national and linguistic contexts and genres have sought to ‘flesh out’ the lives and psychological experiences of women in the orbit of the Haitian Revolution. In my first chapter, I focus on a corpus of plays by Bernard Dadié, Aimé Césaire, Ina Césaire, Edouard Glissant and Maryse Condé to distinguish the dramatization of the Haitian Revolution from its narrativization. My second chapter examines the ambivalent construction of Toussaint Louverture as a heroic yet dictatorial figure to show that Toussaint is simultaneously a historical actor and a mythical legend. My third chapter focuses on the question of whether and on what terms we can depict and comprehend the intimate physical and mental experiences of women living in a system of legally-sanctioned rape to show how authors like Evelyne Trouillot mobilize invention as a way to respond to archival silences. My last chapter studies the phenomenon of cultural translation as writers and artists from Poland, the United States and the wider Caribbean return to the Haitian Revolution as a symbol for their own struggles for freedom and independence to reveal the ethical and political stakes of exporting the Haitian Revolution outside of its original context. My methodology for this project combines close readings with theoretical reflections on historiography, race and gender and the conceptualization of the archive

Theories of structure, dynamics, and plasticity in neural circuits

Neural circuits generate cognition, sensation, and behavior through the coordinated activity of many interconnected units. Understanding how these functions emerge dynamically and what connectivity structures support this emergence is a central challenge in neuroscience. This challenge is compounded by neural circuits' essential features: large numbers of components (neurons), nonlinear dynamics, complex recurrent interactions, and plastic connectivity. This thesis develops theoretical approaches to tackle this complexity, using tools from physics, particularly dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT), to analyze how connectivity structure shapes collective neuronal dynamics and computational functions in nonlinear recurrent neural networks. The chapters of this thesis are loosely organized around three themes. First, I investigate how connectivity structure determines the structure of collective neuronal activity, focusing particularly on activity dimensionality (roughly, the number of high-variance modes). In Chapter 2, I develop a two-site cavity DMFT to calculate cross-covariances in random neural networks, revealing that networks with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) couplings exhibit extensive but fractionally low activity dimensionality and long population-level timescales. Chapter 3 extends this analysis using complementary path-integral fluctuation methods to handle the case of structured (non-i.i.d.) connectivity. Specifically, I introduce the random-mode model, which parameterizes coupling matrices using random input and output modes and enables control over the spectrum. Features of this spectrum manifest as features of collective activity that I compute, and can be undetectable when analyzing only single-neuron activities. I derive a simple relation between the effective rank of connectivity and activity dimensionality, and show how structured overlaps between input and output modes—a feature of biological circuits, as demonstrated using the Drosophila connectome—influence collective dynamics. In Chapter 4, I analyze multiregion neural networks where low-rank connectivity between regions, motivated by experimental studies, enables selective activity routing. Using cross-region currents as order parameters, I show that regions act as both generators and transmitters of activity—roles that are often in tension—and that effective signal routing can be achieved by exciting different high-dimensional activity patterns through connectivity structure and nonlinear dynamics. Second, I examine attractor networks that represent continuous variables or discrete patterns through collective dynamics. Chapter 5 addresses the challenge of reconciling idealized theoretical models (namely, continuous attractors) with heterogeneous experimental data in the context of the rodent head-direction system. I use an optimization principle to construct recurrent networks that match actual mouse head-direction cell responses while exhibiting quasi-continuous-attractor dynamics. Developing and validating a statistical generative process for these responses allows for large-N analysis of such data-derived networks. The connectivity matrix exhibits doublet degeneracy in its spectrum at large N, reflecting an underlying circular geometry embedded in a disorderly manner within neuronal space. Analysis through DMFT reveals that the system becomes equivalent to a classical ring-attractor model as N→∞, defined by circularly symmetric Mexican-hat interactions. This approach extends to higher-dimensional symmetries, including grid cells in medial entorhinal cortex. Chapter 6 challenges conventional interpretations of associative memory models for discrete patterns by analyzing dynamics beyond equilibrium. I derive DMFT equations for dense associative memory models, a generalization of Hopfield networks, and show that patterns can be transiently retrieved with high accuracy above the traditional capacity limit, where stable attractors have vanished, because slow regions persist near stored patterns as traces of former basins of attraction. Third, I explore plasticity and learning in neural networks. Chapter 7 studies networks where both neuronal units and synaptic couplings are dynamic variables, with couplings subject to Hebbian modification around quenched random strengths. This reveals a rich phase diagram. Hebbian plasticity can slow chaotic activity or induce chaos in quiescent networks, while anti-Hebbian plasticity quickens activity and produces an oscillatory component. Strong Hebbian plasticity segregates network timescales into two bands with a slow, synapse-dominated band driving the dynamics, suggesting a flipped view of the network as synapses connected by neurons. In chaotic states with strong Hebbian plasticity, I identify a phase of "freezable chaos" where stable fixed points of neuronal dynamics are continuously destabilized by synaptic dynamics, allowing any neuronal state to be stored as a stable fixed point by halting plasticity, thus offering a new working memory mechanism. Chapter 8 develops cavity methods for high-dimensional convex learning problems, providing unified analyses of perceptron classification of both points and manifolds, and kernel ridge regression by recognizing their shared bipartite structure. For perceptron-capacity problems, I identify a symmetry that allows derivation of correct capacities through a naïve method. Finally, turning to deep learning, Chapter 9 explores biologically plausible alternatives to backpropagation, presenting "global error-vector broadcasting" and "vectorized nonnegative networks" in which globally broadcast signals enable effective, i.e., gradient-aligned, credit assignment. Overall, this thesis uses DMFT and other analytical and numerical tools—including random-matrix theory, iterative solution methods, and large-N simulations—as well as some data analysis, to make progress on various questions surrounding the structure-function relationship in large, nonlinear recurrent neural circuits. In the Introduction, I outline various open questions, particularly the challenge of understanding how neural circuits implement inherently high-dimensional computations through recurrent dynamics. In the Conclusion, I speculate on where the future could take us